Fox News John Stossel Says Freeloading Indians Need to Get Off the Government Payroll (VIDEO)

According to John Stossel Indians (AKA Native Americans) are wards of the state. The government provides everything from healthcare and education to food stamps and burial costs. He then claims that because the government provides all of this the Indians (AKA Native Americans) are in poverty and they are dying young because they sit on their asses all day and do nothing while waiting for their handout.

Well, he doesn’t quite say that. He skips over actually saying that part. But …. well … he basically “says” that.

So how does he prove this? He finds another tribe called the Lumbees who he claims have not been federally recognized and who do not receive any federal handouts. And guess what? Well, golly gee, their buzzilionaires! Wouldn’t ya know?! If you just work hard anyone can be a buzzilionaire! I knew it!

1. The Lumbees became a federally recognized tribe in 1956 – but the bill doing so contained language restricting them from having reservation land and other benefits of full federal recognition.

2. Lumbee tribal members are in fact fully eligible for a number of federal assistance programs, and the majority of the tribe participates in these special benefits: federal housing assistance, school grants, health services, and the like. Indeed, since they are one of the largest tribes east of the Mississippi, with 50,000 members, the Lumbees rank among the largest recipients of federal tribal-aid dollars in the East.

3. The biggest lie, though, was the larger picture that Stossel was trying to present: His depiction of the Lumbee community as extraordinarily wealthy and well off focused on a few wildly successful individuals, while ignoring the harsh reality that is life in Lumbee country. For example, Robeson County, the center of Stossel’s story, is in fact the poorest county in North Carolina, having a majority nonwhite populace.

You know the town of Pembroke, the community where Stossel shot much of this segment? There, the percentage of families who live below the poverty line is 40.7 percent.

Now, it’s easy to see understand how Fox News might completely misinterpret such basic data as this. Heck they have trouble reading basic opinion polls and this is far less subjective! However, anyone with a keen eye watching that piece of propaganda in which Stossel lacks the self disciple to refrain from crapping insults out his mouth knows that NATIVE AMERICANS are not freeloaders.